Can reading a book make you a better person?
Issue 178: Research from our lab investigates if reading non-fiction books can make us more prosocial and less polarized.
This newsletter describes one of our new projects and is brought to you by Brynn Pedrick’s blog post, “Reading and Repair: Tacking Social Division Through Contemplative Research.“ We made some minor revisions and decided to share it with you to give you a sneak peak at our latest research.
In the last few years, we have seen headlines like “Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading”, “Fewer People Are Reading for Fun”, and “Books vs. Brain Rot: why it's so hard to read” dominate the news. These have cast a chill over the publishing industry and led bookworms like us to panic about the future of humanity.
Despite the gloom, booksellers in the United States saw the first annual increase of print book sales in three years in 2024. It was a reminder that even in our increasingly digital age, books remain a powerful, and popular, force—not just for entertainment, but for personal growth. Maybe the media was too fast to write the obituary about books.
Social psychologist Rémi Thériault, wh…
